Origin

Originally an American word, which first appeared meaning an apparatus for making counterfeit coins. The source could have been tantrabogus, a New England word for any strange-looking apparatus or object that possibly came from tantarabobs, which was brought over by colonists from Devon and meant ‘the devil’ or another dialect name for the devil, Bogey, which gave us bogey (mid 19th century) and bogeyman. In golf a bogey is a score of one stroke over par at a hole. Also American is the modern slang sense of bogus, ‘bad’, which came to a wide audience in the name of the 1991 film comedy Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey. It seems to have originated as a term used by young computer hackers in the 1970s for anything useless or incorrect.